Since my earliest days, I’ve had an interest in writing. At age seven, I would write page after page about imaginary creatures—a result of my early exposure to Monster Manuals from Dungeons and Dragons. As a teen, I took to writing a journal. In just one year, I filled two hundred pages with poems of struggle: death, loneliness, love, or cliché nonsense. But I would also write my resolutions: accepting fate, loving solitude, and embracing humanity. Each scattered and jittery work became a brick in the pillar of my life.
Without a pen, I could hardly tell anyone who I was or what I believed in. There was no time in conversation to get my words in line for a proper parade into someone’s understanding. Wood pulp and ink gave my thoughts a grand uniform that allowed them to impress with greater ability than any tongue might. Soon written and spoken words became similar, and what I penned became what I verbalized. Without the gift of writing, I would still be a mute voice, looking on the world rather than living in it.
About Daniel Conroy, How to Read a Poem Scholarship Applicant
Daniel Conroy attends Colorado State University at Pueblo, pursuing a double major in Chemistry and Biology. Born in Texas, raised in Appalachia and Colorado (with intermittent sojourns to Europe), he maintains that literature was a comfort in confusion. He enjoys playing with expanded diction and meandering sentences in prose, but verse is his predominant form of expression. Daniel’s favored poets include Baudelaire, Shelley, and Poe. In novelists, he favors the fantasy of R.A. Salvatore and the realism of Thomas Hardy, particularly Jude the Obscure.
Photo by Gemma Stiles, Creative Commons, via Flickr.